Visual Object Categorisation at Distinct Levels of Abstraction: A New Stimulus Set

We designed a new stimulus set with 269 line drawings of everyday artifacts and animals. The stimulus set contains several typical exemplars from a sample of 25 basic-level categories. We determined to what extent these stimuli were named at the basic level and at a more subordinate level. An additional experiment showed the validity of this calibration: typicality ratings were correlated significantly with the level of naming. In a final experiment we found that this effect depends largely on the global configuration of a stimulus as it was still apparent with degraded images obtained by locally shifting small fragments of the drawings.

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